


hang in heaven with our own kind

by gloss



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alcohol, F/F, Xeno, monsters and mobsters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-26 20:59:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5020336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a literal underworld, and monsters run the black market, so if you're a recently-fired mad scientist, you don't have much choice about where you go for financing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hang in heaven with our own kind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lillifred](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lillifred/gifts).



> Title from Throwing Muses, "[Glass Cats](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdsRr5aH34g)". Eddie directly inspired by [this art](http://pemmiart.tumblr.com/post/126190538193/day-22-feline-girl-version-2-30-day-monster-girl).
> 
> Beta by the ever-patient G.

She regrets ever having complained about procurement and acquisition protocols back on campus. Forms in triplicate, required requests for proposals, inventories of every supply down to pipette stoppers and stray electrons: Maxine would give anything to suffer all of that again.

Instead, she finds herself here, grovelling for a high-interest loan from the queen of the underworld.

"What, precisely, did you hope to accomplish here tonight?" Queen Phoebe asks, syrupy civility falling away to reveal the sharp edge of impatience and impending anger.

The room has gone silent. The shadows surrounding them swell, nudge them all closer to the single light burning on the desk. On one side, there is just Maxine, frail and anxious in her lab coat. On the other side, the queen is flanked by at least five henchwomen, each more terrifying than the last: a harpy in cracked latex; two kinnaris with arms intertwined and heads inclined together, feathers softly rustling over their hindquarters; a towering drakaina with darting, hissing forked tongue; and one of those necro-basts, a small, thickset woman with the skull of a cat and skeletal clawed paws for hands.

For all she knows, there could be another array of heavies lurking behind her. She isn't about to check, not if she doesn't have to.

"I was under the impression that this was just a formality," Maxine protests. Her throat is dry, her pulse is chittering in her chest. She knows she ought to be apologetic, make nice, do whatever the queen requests. But she can't seem to help herself. She is a _scientist_ and this, this, this _creature_ is a thug, an exploiter, a mere criminal. "A formality!"

Queen P raises her single eyebrow -- it is as flexible and elegant as one of her tentacles -- and tilts her head. "This?"

Maxine's hands want to shake. She twists them together in her lap. "This, this meeting, this... _conversation_."

Her work is important. Surely even a gangland queen can see that and fund it accordingly.

The queen leans back in the old-fashioned desk chair, her two dominant tentacles folded over her broad bosom. "My dear, nothing is ever 'just' a formality. My time is far too precious for that."

"I know, of course I know that, I didn't mean --. I only meant that --" Maxine bites off the rush of noisy words. She has wandered into dangerous territory, she knows that much. Any suggestion that the Queen is to be trifled with, her time wasted, her generosity abused, will be met with the gravest of consequences.

A secondary tentacle unfurls from beneath the Queen's cape to beckon one of the henchwomen closer. The drakaina sidles over, tongue darting, slit-irised eyes tracking Maxine, but the queen shakes her head. Drakaina stops, a brief sharp hiss like a whine rising before she melts back into the shadows.

The nauseous clench in Maxine's gut eases a bit. She considers herself a liberal -- some of her best friends are xeno! (Or they would be, probably, if she had any friends left and time to socialize) -- but she hasn't ever quite accustomed herself to the more _herpetological_ of the city's diverse citizenry.

"Eddie," the queen says, and the small catgirl steps forward. Her skull seems slightly radiant in the dark room, opalescent, the eye sockets filled to brimming with a darker, deeper sort of shadow. The kind that, honestly, probably cannot ever be dispelled, not fully, not even at noon.

"Yes?" She speaks with a human voice that resounds slightly against the dome of the skull.

"Remind Dr. Sophist --"

"Dr. Safeest," Maxine corrects her, automatically, helplessly. She doesn't have even a child's sense of self-preservation. "I'm sorry, but it's _Safeest_."

"Eddie, please remind the good doctor how we deal with those who break their promises?"

The two kinnaris chuckle and lean closer, long fingers stroking each other's bare skin; the harpy clicks her beak.

Eddie digs in the high pocket of her heavy woolen peacoat, finally extracting a tiny, wriggling creature. Maxine assumes it is a mouse, perhaps a gerbil, but realizes too late it's one of the homunculae from her old lab. The size of a hamster, but a human woman, naked, struggling to escape. Eddie crunches the homuncula in her fist and bites the back of its neck with her long, perfect canines. Black blood streaks the bone of her jaw, smudges lower curve of her malar apparatus.

Maxine names each bone in the monster's skull, recites them to herself, but she can still hear the cut-off shriek of the homuncula and the crunch of her in the cat's jaws.

"Are we clear?" the queen asks sweetly.

"Yes," Maxine replies. "You'll have your payment. I promise."

"Simply cooperate," Queen P says, her attention already starting to fade. "Do us both a favor and don't promise. It's just so tiresome when you fail."

That much they agree on, Maxine thinks.

*

There is, of course, no metaphorical underworld, no spiritual plane of existence dedicated to punishment and retribution. There is, however, very much a literal underworld, down in the old city core. There, despite encroachment by the various corporate campuses, the various monstrous subcultures struggle to survive, flourish, prevail over each other in byzantine feuds impossible for anyone on the outside to understand.

When she gets off work, the sun is just below the horizon, painting the clouds a vulgar but pretty candy pink. Eddie spits again, takes a swig of the cold barley tea she bought on the corner, and swishes it around her mouth.

It's going to take something much stronger to make her forget the taste of blood.

"Si-ssss-sy," Molly the drakaina scoffs as she passes, her stilettos clicking confidently across the broken asphalt. She trails the scent of jasmine perfume; hers is the kind of glamorous, high-maintenance beauty that simultaneously fascinates and alienates someone like Eddie. "Sssucky baby."

"I'm a vegetarian!" Eddie protests but Molly doesn't break stride. Her long green chiffon stole whispers in the air behind her as she turns the corner and disappears.

Everyone knows Eddie is a vegetarian. Most of all, the queen knows it, given that she needles Eddie about it every chance she gets. Making her eat that little human experiment was just one more of the sadistic woman's tests and power trips.

She does it because she can. And Eddie takes it because she has to.

She needs a new job. Sure, the pay is better than she ever thought possible. And, sure, she has the ideal build for enforcer: Mummy's Little Linebacker, she was called when she was younger. The Tank, when she got a bit older and started frequenting the gay bars. But she'd rather go back to bar-backing or bouncing than rise up the chain of command under Queen Phoebe.

She'd rather do just about _anything_.

*

A week passes and Maxine is seeing no results from her latest experimental sequence. She could waste time blaming her inferior resources, absence of support staff, inadequate equipment -- and all of those factors do contribute to this sorry situation -- but the fact is, she's missing something. Her hypotheses are lacking.

She has taken to leaving the apartment via her bedroom window in order to avoid her housemate. She still owes him last month's rent and the next payment date is rapidly approaching; she thinks, but can't be sure, that she's also due to take over the domestic chores.

She pauses there on the fire escape, squatting until her vertigo ebbs, and wonders whether she ought to just pack it in. End it all. Be done with it.

She is only three stories off the ground, however. With her luck, she'd just break her neck but survive, adding "paraplegic" to her list of most recent accomplishments, which already includes "homeless" and "unemployed due to firing" and "joke of a scientist impostor".

She wastes some of her remaining cash (thank you, Queen Phoebe, your investment in this failure's self-induced temporary amnesia is appreciated) on a short sequence of bathtub bourbons, three or four, maybe more, until she's warm and wiggly and giggly and can't quite discern where her skin ends and the close heat of the bar begins.

"Maybe some tea?" someone says as Maxine's about to order another round.

"Maybe not," Maxine says, then raises her voice, "maybe butt out, huh?"

"No can do," the woman behind her replies. Maxine would turn around, tries, but she starts to slip off the narrow bar stool. The woman grasps her by the shoulders and steadies her. Maxine feels the woman's body press against her back, hears her speak right into her ear. "Have some tea."

"Why?" Maxine asks, feeling sulky, but sips the lukewarm tea that's now in front of her. It tastes good, to be fair, minty and herbal. Her stomach doesn't hurt quite so much, and the room is slowly ending its frantic spin. And all the while, the woman holds her, upright, close, firmly.

"Because I want to talk to you."

"You're not the boss of me," Maxine says and finishes off the tea. "I don't have to --" She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. When she exhales and opens her eyes, she is more sober than not. "That's good tea. What is that?"

"Neighborhood specialty," the woman says and slides in between Maxine and next stool. "Feel better?"

It's that ghoul, the cat- _thing_ , the one that munched a homuncula like a crawfish. 

But rather than disgust, even anger, Maxine simply feels, looking down at the woman, curious.

"I do," she replies. "What do you want? I still have six weeks on my loan, you know."

"That's nice," the necro-bast says, signalling for two more teas. "I'm not here running errands for --" She glances around, empty eye sockets welling with shadows, and lowers her voice. "For her."

"Independent contracting, huh?" Maxine raises her chipped mug in a mockery of a toast. "Believe me, that's overrated. I speak from --" She swallows half the tea. "-- bitter, bitter experience."

The cat seems to smile. Her head sports no skin or muscle, and so it must be a trick of the light, or lingering effects of bourbon, but her expressions do appear to change. "So I've heard."

Maxine scowls. "You have?"

"Most people around here have heard of you, yeah," the cat says. "A campus researcher booted out, building her own lab? Word gets around."

Her voice is soothing: Maxine wants to lean into it, feel it wrap around her just as the tea is warming her insides, calming and settling ailments both physical and emotional.

"I should probably be embarrassed by my notoriety."

The cat regards her quietly, for long enough that Maxine begins to want to fidget. Finally, she says, "but you're not, are you?"

"No," Maxine admits. "It's...kind of flattering, actually."

The cat is shorter than she is, and, Maxine realizes, quite young. She's dressed like many of the younger people around, both monstrous and fully human, wrapped up in scarves and slouchy toques, their skinny limbs swathed in tights and sweaters. They all always seem cold, shielded against winter, urchins playing dress-up.

Next to her, wearing her old-fashioned denim jeans and sweater jacket, Maxine could be her mother.

No, a young aunt. A slightly older cousin.

The cat is thoroughly charming, and completely unaware of that fact. When Maxine slides her hand over the cat's bony knee and strums at the loose threads in a run in her heavy black tights, the cat goes completely still.

"All right?" Maxine asks. 

She nods. "More than --. I'm Eddie. Did I already say that? I must have already said that."

"No," Maxine says, standing, offering her arm. "But I remember now."

*

The scientist has skin _everywhere_. Eddie's never been this close, for this long, to someone completely human. They really are as soft, as _fleshy_ , as slurs and stereotypes would have you believe. No scales, no feathers, bones completely encircled by muscle and skin, and it's intoxicating.

She can't stop reaching for Maxine, can't stop stroking the soft down below her jaw, the smooth skin across her back, even the taut skin across the back of her hands.

"Now, now," Maxine says, sitting back on her heels and holding Eddie's paws against mattress. "Patience."

Eddie shakes her head, arches her back. This is where she's used to pinning her dates, growling a little to make them laugh and squeal, spread and stroke, but Maxine seems to be in charge, seems to know exactly what she wants and what Eddie wants, seems to be willing to make sure it happens.

Maxine tips her head to the side, watching her, and Eddie squirms against the study. The human's hair shifts in the drafts, but her gaze is steady, unreadable.

"What do you want, sweetheart?"

Eddie arches her back again, turning her wrists in Maxine's grasp so her palms are up, open, pleading. Her claws brush Maxine's skin and they both shiver. She does it again, a little harder.

"Anything." It's a request, a promise, and something else, too. "Anything."

*

When they rise from bed, it's nearly morning. The city is uncharacteristically quiet, beset only by rumbles from the subway beneath and the freeway to the west. 

They find a few stalls still open in the night market, and Eddie insists on buying them both breakfast, scrambled soy whites and dark, slick vegetables that Maxine does not recognize.

Food and juice disappear into Eddie's gullet, brighten her tone, pluck her up a little taller.

"Honestly," she says, finishing off Maxine's scramble with a shard of flatbread and stuffing it into her mouth as she keeps speaking, "I just wanted to ask you for a job, that was all."

Her hunger is every bit as impressive as her honesty. Maxine pushes her plate toward Eddie's eager hands and leans back. "I barely have a lab any more, what kind of job could I give you?"

Eddie grins, and Maxine realizes she has long ago surmounted distaste, bypassed tolerance, and she is now able to see, to appreciate, the way the expression lights up the skull, changes everything.

"I'm real resourceful," Eddie assures her. "Maybe you noticed."

Maxine taps her fingers against the edge of the counter. 

The sun is in the sky now, burning off the dawn mist, making the tin roofs of the stalls around them burn bright.

"I had observed as much, yes."

She finds herself smiling back, tasting the memory of fang and moan deep at the back of her mouth, feeling the burn of their exertions last night.

"All right," she says. "I can't promise anything, but --"

"All right!" Eddie hops off her stool and bounces a little in her heavy military-issue boots. When she hugs Maxine, _that_ is the truest thing in a long, long time.


End file.
